OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Hardware-Friendly Implementation of Physical Reservoir Computing with CMOS-based Time-domain Analog Spiking Neurons
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces an analog spiking neuron that utilizes time-domain information, i.e., a time interval of two signal transitions and a pulse width, to construct a spiking neural network (SNN) for a hardware-friendly physical reservoir computing (RC) on a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) platform. A neuron with leaky integrate-and-fire is realized by employing two voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) with opposite sensitivities to the internal control voltage, and the neuron connection structure is restricted by the use of only 4 neighboring neurons on the 2-dimensional plane to feasibly construct a regular network topology. Such a system enables us to compose an SNN with a counter-based readout circuit, which simplifies the hardware implementation of the SNN. Moreover, another technical advantage thanks to the bottom-up integration is the capability of dynamically capturing every neuron state in the network, which can significantly contribute to finding guidelines on how to enhance the performance for various computational tasks in temporal information processing. Diverse nonlinear physical dynamics needed for RC can be realized by collective behavior through dynamic interaction between neurons, like coupled oscillators, despite the simple network structure. With behavioral system-level simulations, we demonstrate physical RC through short-term memory and exclusive OR tasks, and the spoken digit recognition task with an accuracy of 97.7% as well. Our system is considerably feasible for practical applications and also can be a useful platform for studying the mechanism of physical RC.
Fluid Antenna-enabled Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computing Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

The current integrated sensing, communication, and computing (ISCC) systems face significant challenges in both efficiency and resource utilization. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel fluid antenna (FA)-enabled ISCC system, specifically designed for vehicular networks. We develop detailed models for the communication and sensing processes to support this architecture. An integrated latency optimization problem is formulated to jointly optimize computing resources, receive combining matrices, and antenna positions. To tackle this complex problem, we decompose it into three sub-problems and analyze each separately. A mixed optimization algorithm is then designed to address the overall problem comprehensively. Numerical results demonstrate the rapid convergence of the proposed algorithm. Compared with baseline schemes, the FA-enabled vehicle ISCC system significantly improves resource utilization and reduces latency for communication, sensing, and computation.
Designing Interfaces for Multimodal Vector Search Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal vector search offers a new paradigm for information retrieval by exposing numerous pieces of functionality which are not possible in traditional lexical search engines. While multimodal vector search can be treated as a drop in replacement for these traditional systems, the experience can be significantly enhanced by leveraging the unique capabilities of multimodal search. Central to any information retrieval system is a user who expresses an information need, traditional user interfaces with a single search bar allow users to interact with lexical search systems effectively however are not necessarily optimal for multimodal vector search. In this paper we explore novel capabilities of multimodal vector search applications utilising CLIP models and present implementations and design patterns which better allow users to express their information needs and effectively interact with these systems in an information retrieval context.
"A Woman is More Culturally Knowledgeable than A Man?": The Effect of Personas on Cultural Norm Interpretation in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

As the deployment of large language models (LLMs) expands, there is an increasing demand for personalized LLMs. One method to personalize and guide the outputs of these models is by assigning a persona -- a role that describes the expected behavior of the LLM (e.g., a man, a woman, an engineer). This study investigates whether an LLM's understanding of social norms varies across assigned personas. Ideally, the perception of a social norm should remain consistent regardless of the persona, since acceptability of a social norm should be determined by the region the norm originates from, rather than by individual characteristics such as gender, body size, or race. A norm is universal within its cultural context. In our research, we tested 36 distinct personas from 12 sociodemographic categories (e.g., age, gender, beauty) across four different LLMs. We find that LLMs' cultural norm interpretation varies based on the persona used and the norm interpretation also varies within a sociodemographic category (e.g., a fat person and a thin person as in physical appearance group) where an LLM with the more socially desirable persona (e.g., a thin person) interprets social norms more accurately than with the less socially desirable persona (e.g., a fat person). We also discuss how different types of social biases may contribute to the results that we observe.
Relax DARTS: Relaxing the Constraints of Differentiable Architecture Search for Eye Movement Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Eye movement biometrics is a secure and innovative identification method. Deep learning methods have shown good performance, but their network architecture relies on manual design and combined priori knowledge. To address these issues, we introduce automated network search (NAS) algorithms to the field of eye movement recognition and present Relax DARTS, which is an improvement of the Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) to realize more efficient network search and training. The key idea is to circumvent the issue of weight sharing by independently training the architecture parameters $α$ to achieve a more precise target architecture. Moreover, the introduction of module input weights $β$ allows cells the flexibility to select inputs, to alleviate the overfitting phenomenon and improve the model performance. Results on four public databases demonstrate that the Relax DARTS achieves state-of-the-art recognition performance. Notably, Relax DARTS exhibits adaptability to other multi-feature temporal classification tasks.
OSINT Clinic: Co-designing AI-Augmented Collaborative OSINT Investigations for Vulnerability Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Small businesses need vulnerability assessments to identify and mitigate cyber risks. Cybersecurity clinics provide a solution by offering students hands-on experience while delivering free vulnerability assessments to local organizations. To scale this model, we propose an Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) clinic where students conduct assessments using only publicly available data. We enhance the quality of investigations in the OSINT clinic by addressing the technical and collaborative challenges. Over the duration of the 2023-24 academic year, we conducted a three-phase co-design study with six students. Our study identified key challenges in the OSINT investigations and explored how generative AI could address these performance gaps. We developed design ideas for effective AI integration based on the use of AI probes and collaboration platform features. A pilot with three small businesses highlighted both the practical benefits of AI in streamlining investigations, and limitations, including privacy concerns and difficulty in monitoring progress.
RockTrack: A 3D Robust Multi-Camera-Ken Multi-Object Tracking Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

3D Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) obtains significant performance improvements with the rapid advancements in 3D object detection, particularly in cost-effective multi-camera setups. However, the prevalent end-to-end training approach for multi-camera trackers results in detector-specific models, limiting their versatility. Moreover, current generic trackers overlook the unique features of multi-camera detectors, i.e., the unreliability of motion observations and the feasibility of visual information. To address these challenges, we propose RockTrack, a 3D MOT method for multi-camera detectors. Following the Tracking-By-Detection framework, RockTrack is compatible with various off-the-shelf detectors. RockTrack incorporates a confidence-guided preprocessing module to extract reliable motion and image observations from distinct representation spaces from a single detector. These observations are then fused in an association module that leverages geometric and appearance cues to minimize mismatches. The resulting matches are propagated through a staged estimation process, forming the basis for heuristic noise modeling. Additionally, we introduce a novel appearance similarity metric for explicitly characterizing object affinities in multi-camera settings. RockTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes vision-only tracking leaderboard with 59.1% AMOTA while demonstrating impressive computational efficiency.
NPAT Null-Space Projected Adversarial Training Towards Zero Deterioration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

To mitigate the susceptibility of neural networks to adversarial attacks, adversarial training has emerged as a prevalent and effective defense strategy. Intrinsically, this countermeasure incurs a trade-off, as it sacrifices the model's accuracy in processing normal samples. To reconcile the trade-off, we pioneer the incorporation of null-space projection into adversarial training and propose two innovative Null-space Projection based Adversarial Training(NPAT) algorithms tackling sample generation and gradient optimization, named Null-space Projected Data Augmentation (NPDA) and Null-space Projected Gradient Descent (NPGD), to search for an overarching optimal solutions, which enhance robustness with almost zero deterioration in generalization performance. Adversarial samples and perturbations are constrained within the null-space of the decision boundary utilizing a closed-form null-space projector, effectively mitigating threat of attack stemming from unreliable features. Subsequently, we conducted experiments on the CIFAR10 and SVHN datasets and reveal that our methodology can seamlessly combine with adversarial training methods and obtain comparable robustness while keeping generalization close to a high-accuracy model.
Synthesizing Evolving Symbolic Representations for Autonomous Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, AI systems have made remarkable progress in various tasks. Deep Reinforcement Learning(DRL) is an effective tool for agents to learn policies in low-level state spaces to solve highly complex tasks. Researchers have introduced Intrinsic Motivation(IM) to the RL mechanism, which simulates the agent's curiosity, encouraging agents to explore interesting areas of the environment. This new feature has proved vital in enabling agents to learn policies without being given specific goals. However, even though DRL intelligence emerges through a sub-symbolic model, there is still a need for a sort of abstraction to understand the knowledge collected by the agent. To this end, the classical planning formalism has been used in recent research to explicitly represent the knowledge an autonomous agent acquires and effectively reach extrinsic goals. Despite classical planning usually presents limited expressive capabilities, PPDDL demonstrated usefulness in reviewing the knowledge gathered by an autonomous system, making explicit causal correlations, and can be exploited to find a plan to reach any state the agent faces during its experience. This work presents a new architecture implementing an open-ended learning system able to synthesize from scratch its experience into a PPDDL representation and update it over time. Without a predefined set of goals and tasks, the system integrates intrinsic motivations to explore the environment in a self-directed way, exploiting the high-level knowledge acquired during its experience. The system explores the environment and iteratively: (a) discover options, (b) explore the environment using options, (c) abstract the knowledge collected and (d) plan. This paper proposes an alternative approach to implementing open-ended learning architectures exploiting low-level and high-level representations to extend its knowledge in a virtuous loop.
Massively parallel CMA-ES with increasing population
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

The Increasing Population Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (IPOP-CMA-ES) algorithm is a reference stochastic optimizer dedicated to blackbox optimization, where no prior knowledge about the underlying problem structure is available. This paper aims at accelerating IPOP-CMA-ES thanks to high performance computing and parallelism when solving large optimization problems. We first show how BLAS and LAPACK routines can be introduced in linear algebra operations, and we then propose two strategies for deploying IPOP-CMA-ES efficiently on large-scale parallel architectures with thousands of CPU cores. The first parallel strategy processes the multiple searches in the same ordering as the sequential IPOP-CMA-ES, while the second one processes concurrently these multiple searches. These strategies are implemented in MPI+OpenMP and compared on 6144 cores of the supercomputer Fugaku. We manage to obtain substantial speedups (up to several thousand) and even super-linear ones, and we provide an in-depth analysis of our results to understand precisely the superior performance of our second strategy.
Investigating team maturity in an agile automotive reorganization
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

About seven years ago, Volvo Cars initiated a large-scale agile transformation. Midst this journey, a significant restructuring of the R&D department took place. Our study aims to illuminate how team maturity levels are impacted during such comprehensive reorganizations. We collected data from 63 teams to comprehend the effects of organizational changes on these agile teams. Additionally, qualitative data was gathered to validate our findings and explore underlying reasons. Contrary to what was expected, the reorganization did not significantly alter the distribution of team maturity. High turnover rates and frequent reorganizations were identified as key factors to why the less mature teams remained in the early stages of team development. Conversely, teams in the second category remained stable at a higher maturity stage, primarily because the teams themselves remained largely intact, with only management structures changing. In conclusion, while reorganizations may hinder some teams' development, others maintain stability at a higher level of maturity despite substantial managerial changes.
Inside Out or Not: Privacy Implications of Emotional Disclosure
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Privacy is dynamic, sensitive, and contextual, much like our emotions. Previous studies have explored the interplay between privacy and context, privacy and emotion, and emotion and context. However, there remains a significant gap in understanding the interplay of these aspects simultaneously. In this paper, we present a preliminary study investigating the role of emotions in driving individuals' information sharing behaviour, particularly in relation to urban locations and social ties. We adopt a novel methodology that integrates context (location and time), emotion, and personal information sharing behaviour, providing a comprehensive analysis of how contextual emotions affect privacy. The emotions are assessed with both self-reporting and electrodermal activity (EDA). Our findings reveal that self-reported emotions influence personal information-sharing behaviour with distant social groups, while neutral emotions lead individuals to share less precise information with close social circles, a pattern is potentially detectable with wrist-worn EDA. Our study helps lay the foundation for personalised emotion-aware strategies to mitigate oversharing risks and enhance user privacy in the digital age.
Constraint Guided AutoEncoders for Joint Optimization of Condition Indicator Estimation and Anomaly Detection in Machine Condition Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The main goal of machine condition monitoring is, as the name implies, to monitor the condition of industrial applications. The objective of this monitoring can be mainly split into two problems. A diagnostic problem, where normal data should be distinguished from anomalous data, otherwise called Anomaly Detection (AD), or a prognostic problem, where the aim is to predict the evolution of a Condition Indicator (CI) that reflects the condition of an asset throughout its life time. When considering machine condition monitoring, it is expected that this CI shows a monotonic behavior, as the condition of a machine gradually degrades over time. This work proposes an extension to Constraint Guided AutoEncoders (CGAE), which is a robust AD method, that enables building a single model that can be used for both AD and CI estimation. For the purpose of improved CI estimation the extension incorporates a constraint that enforces the model to have monotonically increasing CI predictions over time. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm performs similar, or slightly better, than CGAE, with regards to AD, while improving the monotonic behavior of the CI.
End-to-End Probabilistic Geometry-Guided Regression for 6DoF Object Pose Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

6D object pose estimation is the problem of identifying the position and orientation of an object relative to a chosen coordinate system, which is a core technology for modern XR applications. State-of-the-art 6D object pose estimators directly predict an object pose given an object observation. Due to the ill-posed nature of the pose estimation problem, where multiple different poses can correspond to a single observation, generating additional plausible estimates per observation can be valuable. To address this, we reformulate the state-of-the-art algorithm GDRNPP and introduce EPRO-GDR (End-to-End Probabilistic Geometry-Guided Regression). Instead of predicting a single pose per detection, we estimate a probability density distribution of the pose. Using the evaluation procedure defined by the BOP (Benchmark for 6D Object Pose Estimation) Challenge, we test our approach on four of its core datasets and demonstrate superior quantitative results for EPRO-GDR on LM-O, YCB-V, and ITODD. Our probabilistic solution shows that predicting a pose distribution instead of a single pose can improve state-of-the-art single-view pose estimation while providing the additional benefit of being able to sample multiple meaningful pose candidates.
ABHINAW: A method for Automatic Evaluation of Typography within AI-Generated Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the fast-evolving field of Generative AI, platforms like MidJourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion have transformed Text-to-Image (T2I) Generation. However, despite their impressive ability to create high-quality images, they often struggle to generate accurate text within these images. Theoretically, if we could achieve accurate text generation in AI images in a ``zero-shot'' manner, it would not only make AI-generated images more meaningful but also democratize the graphic design industry. The first step towards this goal is to create a robust scoring matrix for evaluating text accuracy in AI-generated images. Although there are existing bench-marking methods like CLIP SCORE and T2I-CompBench++, there's still a gap in systematically evaluating text and typography in AI-generated images, especially with diffusion-based methods. In this paper, we introduce a novel evaluation matrix designed explicitly for quantifying the performance of text and typography generation within AI-generated images. We have used letter by letter matching strategy to compute the exact matching scores from the reference text to the AI generated text. Our novel approach to calculate the score takes care of multiple redundancies such as repetition of words, case sensitivity, mixing of words, irregular incorporation of letters etc. Moreover, we have developed a Novel method named as brevity adjustment to handle excess text. In addition we have also done a quantitative analysis of frequent errors arise due to frequently used words and less frequently used words. Project page is available at: https://github.com/Abhinaw3906/ABHINAW-MATRIX.
Less Memory Means smaller GPUs: Backpropagation with Compressed Activations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The ever-growing scale of deep neural networks (DNNs) has lead to an equally rapid growth in computational resource requirements. Many recent architectures, most prominently Large Language Models, have to be trained using supercomputers with thousands of accelerators, such as GPUs or TPUs. Next to the vast number of floating point operations the memory footprint of DNNs is also exploding. In contrast, GPU architectures are notoriously short on memory. Even comparatively small architectures like some EfficientNet variants cannot be trained on a single consumer-grade GPU at reasonable mini-batch sizes. During training, intermediate input activations have to be stored until backpropagation for gradient calculation. These make up the vast majority of the memory footprint. In this work we therefore consider compressing activation maps for the backward pass using pooling, which can reduce both the memory footprint and amount of data movement. The forward computation remains uncompressed. We empirically show convergence and study effects on feature detection at the example of the common vision architecture ResNet. With this approach we are able to reduce the peak memory consumption by 29% at the cost of a longer training schedule, while maintaining prediction accuracy compared to an uncompressed baseline.
Mixture of Experts Fusion for Fake Audio Detection Using Frozen wav2vec 2.0
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Speech synthesis technology has posed a serious threat to speaker verification systems. Currently, the most effective fake audio detection methods utilize pretrained models, and integrating features from various layers of pretrained model further enhances detection performance. However, most of the previously proposed fusion methods require fine-tuning the pretrained models, resulting in excessively long training times and hindering model iteration when facing new speech synthesis technology. To address this issue, this paper proposes a feature fusion method based on the Mixture of Experts, which extracts and integrates features relevant to fake audio detection from layer features, guided by a gating network based on the last layer feature, while freezing the pretrained model. Experiments conducted on the ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof2021 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance compared to those requiring fine-tuning.
Reinforcement Learning as an Improvement Heuristic for Real-World Production Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with heuristic methods is an emerging trend for solving optimization problems, which leverages RL's ability to learn from the data generated during the search process. One promising approach is to train an RL agent as an improvement heuristic, starting with a suboptimal solution that is iteratively improved by applying small changes. We apply this approach to a real-world multiobjective production scheduling problem. Our approach utilizes a network architecture that includes Transformer encoding to learn the relationships between jobs. Afterwards, a probability matrix is generated from which pairs of jobs are sampled and then swapped to improve the solution. We benchmarked our approach against other heuristics using real data from our industry partner, demonstrating its superior performance.